![]() ![]() Bennu was born around the same time as the rest of our solar system, so scientists are hopeful that by studying the asteroid, we’ll get some clues about how life on Earth came to be. Klimek: As Earth makes its yearlong journey around the sun, it occasionally passes a small companion nearby: an asteroid about a third of a mile in diameter named Bennu. It may sound like something out of “The X-Files,” but this was actually a planned landing 20 years in the making.ĭante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator: It’s great to be here at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where since September 25, when the OSIRIS-REx samples arrived, we have been systematically and methodically getting into the science canister and ultimately to the sample collection device-the actual piece of spacecraft hardware that touched the surface of asteroid Bennu and collected material back in 2020. Today we are discussing the initial findings of NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex asteroid sample after its reveal earlier today.Ĭhris Klimek: Earlier this fall, a space capsule landed in the Utah desert. Shaneequa Vereen, NASA public affairs officer: Hello and welcome to today’s media telecon. Robert Oppenheimer, the OceanGate Titan disaster, Killers of the Flower Moon and more, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. To subscribe to “There’s More to That” and to listen to past episodes on J. On the latest episode of the Smithsonian podcast “There’s More to That,” I spoke with Linda Shiner, the former editor of Air & Space magazine, about the challenges and triumphs of the OSIRIS-REx mission, and what scientists hope it will teach us about how life on Earth began.Ī transcript is below. ![]() Scientists will be studying them for decades in the hope of unlocking the mystery of how life on Earth began-but they’ve already learned enough to get them excited. The contents of that canister are older than Earth itself. And earlier this fall, that sample collection cannister landed, via parachute, at a Department of Defense proving ground in Utah about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City. Just more than six months later, part of the spacecraft began its journey home to Earth. ![]() On October 20, 2020, it made a brief landing on Bennu’s surface to collect samples of the ancient rock. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft launched on September 8, 2016, and began orbiting the skyscraper-sized asteroid Bennu on December 31, 2018. Capturing a piece of an asteroid and bringing it to Earth is even more difficult than it is time-consuming. ![]()
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